Diary of a stockmistress

Claudia FitzHerbert's weekly dispatch from a small Oxford bookshop.

"No, I'm not." This last is a lie which, because I am talking to my sister, shows in my face.

She picks up a book from the top of the pile that she has caught me red-handed carrying out of the library.

Tell me, she says, in an even voice, what exactly you were intending to do with the Adventures of a Three Guinea Watch?

"Take me to the junkshop," is written all over the faded red cover of this undeservedly forgotten schoolboy classic. I hesitate. A schoolboy nephew steps in to save my skin.

"I love that book," he says. "It's really mad there's this watch what sits in the window of this shop and a hand comes down and -"

I have never loved the boy so much. "I'm building up a collection of stories that begin in shops," I say, and this time my face gives nothing away, for it occurs to me that I might well get going on just such a collection, one of these days.

My sister Bert remains suspicious. "Just make sure you don't throw anything out," she says, for the nth time since I began on my great book sort-out.

I am on holiday, in the dilapidated house in a damp Devon valley that I share with my brothers and sisters. My plan was to forget about books for a week and do some reading, but I find that my mind is not so easily freed. Time was when I smiled to discover 24 volumes of the collected works of Thomas Carlyle in the People's Edition, 23 of them with the pages uncut. And felt mildly consoled by the sight of bookcases buckling beneath 50 years of The Month - bound copies of a Catholic periodical given to my mother by a scholarly Jesuit who knew her weakness for a handsome spine. Now I am bored and oppressed by the sight of so many great unreads in the room we call the library.

"I know what's there," I wail, "even with my eyes shut. And I can't not care."

Bert shakes her head. "Dust if you must," she says. "But leave the books be."

I determine to disobey, and take to rising at dawn to do some filtering before anyone else is awake. In the shop my rule is not that the books must earn their place on the shelves by being bought within the few weeks demanded by the Chains That Know No Shame, but that the book must have the air of something that someone might want to read and with luck even buy at some point in the future.

I am happy for the home rule to be similarly elastic - books earn their shelf space either because they have been read and may one day be read again or because someone in the house has a vague intention of one day taking a dip. I spend the days filling the holes that I make when the house is still asleep.

"Not these," says Bert, coming across a shoebox of Muriel Sparks.

I admit that the spines aren't quite up to the standard of The Month. It is, in fact, an unusually manky hoard that she has caught me with - the fruit of an early and ignorant shop on abebooks, the internet site that takes you into a network of second-hand bookshops. My plan had been to build up a hardback collection of the 100 or so novels that I had loved most in the past 10 years. But I was a virgin on the site, and a cheapskate, and didn't know to avoid the "ex-library copy" copies like the plague. I regretted the purchase at once - enough not to take the books back to Oxford, enough to leave them mouldering under my bed in the ancestral mansion. But I am curious that Bert should share my aesthetic when we disagree on almost everything else.

"They look like stolen goods," she explains, when I challenge her.

"So what... given that they're not?"

"It gives a bad impression," she replies, with a fixed look out of the window.

I look to see what she is staring at. Feckless Frank's car has broken down and is smoking merrily at the top of the lane. It is our brother's turn to have some friends to stay.

"I don't think the Asbos are interested in books," I say with a shudder as several creatures from hell come limping up the drive.